JediMaster

Well, oxygen IN the air won't cause planes to crash, although the LACK of it would. However, birds IN the air could.

Yes, but the A-10C doesn't even HAVE a radar! I just know a DCS: F-15E would be a ball-breaker with radar usage.

Yup, I've known a few people to lose their canopies on T/O in LOMAC/FC during MP. It's because the default cockpit view doesn't emphasize the thing is open unless you have TIR and look up/left/right and see the frame. Makes it louder, too. Another sim that fit in the LOMAC mold was EEAH/EECH (before the mods). I remember getting in and compared to the almost-DCS-like fidelity of LB2 being taken aback by the simplifications made. That said, it worked great in MP and I flew quite a bit of it. The later mods have upped that fidelity to closer to LB2, although still not quite.

Not bad if that's all he needed. Makes TK's quarter million for MP seem steep!

...birds?

Actually, I'd say my main problem so far has been (compared to LOMAC/FC/Black Shark) the sheer number of controls I need to map to my stick. Trying to keep DMS Forward long = hat 2 up-with-long-press and TMS Forward Short = hat 3 up-but-short-press straight in my head has proven taxing. Then to remember that it's TMS and not DMS I need to use for this function but I need to use DMS for that one is the part that gets me. I suppose the main issue is that I've not had the time to devote to it yet really (but now I've got DCS World and 1.2.0 of BS2 and A-10C in, so I mean to spend more time) and it's not like FC or others where you just map S2=lock on. Using the MFDs when not in combat is fine, but you can't be clicking around when fighting, so the HOTAS is where you go and I've just not got it down yet.

Been shot down by tanks in my Ka-50 about 10 times too many! Never get closer than 2km to a tank! As soon as you get the laser warning, RUN.

Yes, although do that with care. I had an MS-provided driver update screw up a device once. I had to roll back the driver and remind myself to never let it DL it again! I think it was related to the 3rd party HD controller on my mobo, it made my CDROMs stop working! As for supporting SSDs, there's not much to worry about. As long as your laptop uses a SATA drive it should work. If it's PATA, well, I don't know how many 2.5" PATA SSD drives there might be. Cost is another matter.

There are lots of people that aren't "normal" that never harm a single person. You advocate regular mental health screenings for the entire population? Seeing as mental health can go from "fine" to "disturbed" in a relatively short period of time, not even annual screenings would cut it. Maybe quarterly? So, that's over 1 billion screenings per year in the US alone. And I'd bet a good chunk of the money that would cost that people will STILL slip thru the cracks. Just watch some idiot propose metal detectors at movie theaters now.

Two words: Combined Arms. Being able to control ground units in first/3rd person and not just "flying by at Mach .9" is a great reason for that detail. Imagine how those things would look thru the zoomed sight of an M1A2 before you blast it!

Who's going to try and take it from a pair of 20mm cannons??

You're running Office 2010 right? I think you'll have to wait for Office 2013 for Metro integration. As for your laptop problem, I have three letters for you: SSD. For my desktop I really don't care yet as long as the HDD is fast enough, but for my next laptop I'm getting an SSD because of both speed (which laptops need more help in the storage area than desktops do) and the whole shock reliability thing. Only thing I don't like is I prefer SOME audible indication of the HDD doing its thing...hearing access when you shouldn't be having any is a great way to troubleshoot a problem in many different areas before it becomes a BIG problem. SSDs just have a light that is on or not!

Oh, I get it. For a second, I was thinking "racing in slo-mo? isn't that just....driving?"

In other words, you'll need to extract the .ini from the CAT file if you don't already have it out there for another mod.

Yeah, with that much horsepower you shouldn't be getting those hiccups. I'm going to peg that Intel setup as the problem absent any further info. My guess is either the sounds are NOT getting cached due to a glitch in how it's caching, or there's some latency in accessing when going from stuff cached on the SSD to what it isn't on the HDD. Also, "green" drives spin down within seconds of you ceasing to access them. So if the files you need are mostly loaded into RAM or the SSD, but the sound files are left on the green drive, when it has to spin up to grab them...bump. I'll also wager you may be the only one playing TW sims with that setup, and I can guarantee TK isn't and wouldn't have seen it himself! I just recently bought a 1TB WD Black HDD and I deliberately skipped the green version for 3 reasons: although the Green was like $20 more for a 2TB drive, it's slower (some people said they're all 5400 even if the listing says 7200); the warranty was only 1 or 2 years compared to I think the 5 this one has; and the failure rate for the Green drives was higher. Larger percentage of DOAs, large number failed during warranty, large number failed once warranty expired. I paid a bit more to get the reliability and speed I wanted.

In addition to your HDD speed, how much RAM do you have? You might be running on the low end of what you need.

Wouldn't her hair look worse if she was a real pilot? Stuffed in those helmets and such?

Yes, LOTS of time to learn the A-10C unless you fly simplified, and like I said that's like SF2. I don't know what other changes FC3 will have other than "FC2 for DCS World", but I hope it's something worthwhile.

By the time I retire it will likely be 75 to be a "senior citizen"!

I've heard it's been strengthened, not least because of being able to drop the sonobouys and having the weapons bays, but I doubt that P-8s will get as many decades as a P-3 in that regime. Not without major, regular SLEPs. However, it's also possible by the time the P-8s need it everyone will just use marine UAVs anyway.

FC2 =/= DCS. Not even close. The A-10A in Flaming Cliffs (any version) is closer to TK's A-10 in SF2:E than it is to DCS. I can fly like Luke Skywalker in FC in the A-10, killing an entire tank column in one pass between all the weapons I have, and landing on a runway with battle damage after approaching it at 90 degrees and making a hard turn over the landing spot! Same with TW's sims. The A-10C will have none of that crap. You can ease up the DCS level to about SF2's, yes. For me the one problem with DCS is the scalability is rather extreme. It's there, yes. But you basically have Falcon 4 on steroids or you have SF2. That LOMAC/Flaming Cliffs level is skipped over unfortunately, as I think I'd rather fly the A-10C that way. To date I have more kills with the gun in A-10C than all other weapons combined because even the Maverick is a PITA compared to every other sim I've used it in except Falcon 4, and there the difficulty was the graphics making ID hard. As for graphical differences between FC2/Black Shark and A-10C/Black Shark 2/P-51D/CA/DCS World, they're pretty minor. The major difference is FC2/BS1 work just fine on 32 bit systems at max level, while starting with A-10C you need a 64-bit system and 4GB of RAM to run max levels.

Differences between the Ka-50 and A-10C: while the Ka-50's weapons systems are easy to learn use, the helo is not easy to fly and flying and fighting is even harder (especially as you have to point the nose just so to hit anything, whether firing rockets, missiles, or guns). Beware getting your trimmer out of whack! Ctrl-Enter is your friend! Conversely the A-10C is pretty easy to fly and point the nose wherever, whenever, with no worries while the systems are really convoluted to the point that I can get several guns kills in the time it takes me to line up one Maverick shot! Of course, I have like 10 hrs in A-10C and like 70 in the Ka-50, so that's part of it. But the A-10A in LOMAC/FC is closer to TK's A-10 than the DCS A-10C. So I can even T/O and land the Ka-50 with more ease than I can the A-10C (and landing the 50 with battle damage is a hair-raising experience, especially with rotor damage).

I'll bet the core temperature never gets that high, and the pressure ratio must be like 1:1 with how much air leaks between those blocks!!

That's one thing I found about Vista and 7...don't install it on a single-core CPU. XP is always best with 1 core. With 2, 7 runs best. Faster booting is nice, but really how often do you boot? Work PCs boot once a day unless they're left running all night for patch/antivirus management. Home PCs probably the same, unless you use it in the morning before work and again after, so maybe twice. You can always let it sleep instead if you want faster startup. Honestly, 7's start was never too bad for me. Maybe 30 seconds? I want a faster OS in execution of everything, not just starting. Shutdown is the worst. For most of Window's history it's been slow closing everything.

You have to admit military paint schemes for large birds are never very inspiring. I think the last good ones were the SEA B-52s in the early 70s. I wonder if the P-8 is actually supposed to fly as low as the P-3 or if it's only going to be flying low for a Boeing.